“If you think you’re in the wrong place, you’re there.”
Not the typical email you’d expect to receive from a company’s head of marketing, and yet the next day, standing in front of double doors covered in nonsensical graffiti, I don’t think twice. This is undoubtedly Grado Labs, where the Grado family, founded by master watchmaker Joseph Grado, has been lovingly crafting phonograph cartridges for turntables in Brooklyn since 1953 (and clearly relying on sound quality and word of mouth for advertising purposes, not showy signs and commercials).
Though the Sunset Park-based factory is now strictly used for the making of headphones and phono cartridges, the townhouse doubled as the Grado family’s home up until 1999. These days, the 24-year-old vice president of marketing, Jonathan Grado—the third generation Grado and youngest employee by approximately 25 years—takes audiophiles on a tour that is peppered with as many personal memories as musical ones.
Up creaky stairs and past a barking dog, there’s the impressive yet cozy listening room with deep blue walls and maroon carpet. Sure, it contains large mahogany tower speakers built in the early ’90s, framed articles written about the company in publications like Esquire and The New York Times, and stunning close-ups of several Grado headphones shot by Jonathan. But it also features additional prized possessions: his father’s favorite rock, jazz, and blues records, including Eric Clapton’s Unplugged—“one of the three albums my dad uses when he’s designing the sound”—and paintings of family members made by John’s father.
“This used to be my living room. I opened up my Nintendo 64 right there,” he says, looking towards the wall where the framed press pieces are lined up. Jonathan also has fond memories of the second floor: the headphones floor. He points to a wall where his height was marked over the years.
“I didn’t really understand that they were headphones,” he says of when he would sit on a workbench and watch. “I was just watching things get built in front of me, and handing pieces over, and smashing pieces together hoping that they’d fit. I probably broke so many things.”
It must be so amazing to watch this house change so much, I say to Jonathan.
“It’s changed, and then it hasn’t changed at the same time,” he says. “My dad’s happy-content being in this building, not like a lazy-content. This is the busiest we’ve been since 1953.”
Grado Labs has roughly 20 employees, and most work within the factory.
“My dad really likes not having a lot of space between him and the product and the machines,” Jonathan says. “He doesn’t want to sit behind a desk and have like 300 people work on [products]. He’s like, ‘When you take over, you can outgrow the building if you want, but this is like our lucky rabbit’s foot.’”
He pauses, then says, “I have no plans on leaving this building.” Neither do the ancient sticky hands and glow-in-the-dark stars still connected to the ceiling of his childhood bedroom.
***
The 1980s marked an important decade in electronics history. Classic video games like Pac-Man, Tetris, and the Super Mario series were released, digital synthesizers became more affordable and accessible, and the CD was introduced. And with the CD came a slump in phonograph cartridge sales for the Grados.
“In 1990, we probably hit the bottom,” says Jonathan’s father John, the company’s president and CEO. Grado Labs went from making half a million phono cartridges a year at its peak in 1953 to only 12,000 in 1990.
“In the late ’80s, we knew we had to do something else if we were going to survive,” he explains. “We decided to get into headphones. In 1990, we never suspected that in 2015, we would still be in the phono cartridge business. And it’s come back. Not to the point where it was, but it’s almost where headphones, and analog cartridges, and turntables are the hot items in the audio industry. People ask me, ‘Why?’ And one of the things I tell them is that I think young people who weren’t here when it went away 35 years ago—for them, it’s new technology.”
John talks about other headphone companies. Beats, Sennheiser, Skullcandy—compared to Grado’s classic, retro look, “They have what we consider more fashion-type headphones,” he says.
AKG, beyerdynamic, Sennheiser, too—“I consider those more of our competitors,” he says. “They’ve been around. Sennheiser probably has a million square feet of space. This is us.”
John continues, “Now I’m not claiming we would be successful, but we could’ve grown this tremendously. I don’t have great desires. I like getting my hands dirty. I like coming to work. So we’ve grown, and it’s a natural growth, as people find out about us.”
Though he’s not too impressed by the sound quality of Beats, John admits that the company launched at the right time, which only benefitted other headphone manufacturers, Grado Labs included.
“In the ’90s, the young kids really were all busy playing video games and not listening to music,” he recalls. “The iPod, the iPhone, players like that, got the kids listening to music again, and then Beats kind of made it fashionable for them to wear headphones. We’ve benefited from the Beats because it got them listening to headphones, and we might have rode the coattails. We get lots of calls from fathers: ‘My kid wanted Beats. Got him a pair of SR60s. He went to school and they made fun of him because of the way they looked. And then he let his friends who had Beats listen to ours, and they saw, or, they heard, what it’s all about. There’s almost a mentality, where all of a sudden they see we have a 60 and an 80—$80 and $100, basically. They can’t conceive that something for $80 could sound better than something for $300.”
It’s now Grado Labs’ 62nd year in business. They have about 400 retailers in the U.S., and their products are available in 60 different countries.
“We’ve been around a long time,” says John, “and we have a nice story, and everybody seems to be getting into the headphone business. But they can’t—that legacy that we built, you can’t do that in two or three years. Or even 10 years. There are people—we come out with something, and they just trust that it’s going to be quality, and really, if you think about it, on our part that’s a lot of work. We have to live up to that. So we have to watch what we put out,” he laughs, “that we don’t put out a lemon.”
Grado Labs has yet to put out a lemon, though speaking of things that grow on trees, they did recently put out a series of headphones grown from one. Marking the beginning of the Grado Heritage Series is the GH1: a limited edition batch of headphones built from a maple tree slab.
The Grado family bought this tree from a Brooklyn-based company that gets rid of old trees that need to be removed—perhaps they’re about to fall, or they’re in the way of something, for example. Rather than go to waste, these trees usually get made into furniture. But one special tree was used to make the gorgeous GH1s. And in true Grado fashion, the tree didn’t just come from anywhere in Brooklyn—it was born and raised in Sunset Park.
Article images: Lauren Kallen